Yeah so my birthday was yesterday and I did something a little out of the ordinary

Normally you sit there and just wait for people to call or text and wish you happy birthday

I took a more proactive stance and called my dad and had probably the best convo I’ve ever had with him

My dad and I have not had the best relationship throughout the years.

Id say over like the past 3-4 years it has gotten a lot better. To the point that we actually laugh and joke with each other over the phone now.

I learned a lot more about him yesterday and his youth.

I really called to thank him for helping me get to where I am now.

That was a birthday present in and of itself. Because I wasn’t always with my dad.

I started living with my dad and my step mom when I was 10. And it was hard for a while because I didn’t know a lot about him

My family, but moreso him, had a ton of expectations on me because I was so blatantly smart and I HATED that shit

Everybody over here in classes barely passing nshit. I make a B on something hard and it’s not good enough. Cuz he knew I had A potential on everything.

After years and years of skyscraper height expectations, I started failing a lot from 18-24

And that drove a wedge deeper into our relationship, mostly because my life wasn’t what he thought it was gonna be and I was frustrated with where I was.

The turning point in my relationship was my second time failing out of college.

That was when I moved to live with my grandma. I think that was important because there was so much anger built up between the both of us that we needed it to dissipate.

Since that time I’ve spent 11 years away from them.

Like away away not on some I love across town shit. On some I live 2-3 states away where I don’t know anybody shit

And our relationship has turned drastically.

My dad brought up something interesting yesterday.

He said “tanei I remember I used to think that you were the most selfish kid I had ever seen when you were younger. But as you’ve gotten older I don’t see that anymore.”

“Yeah because y’all always had these expectations for me without knowing what I wanted for myself.”

Y’all. Literally, every time I didn’t get every single award possible at an honors day, or win this spelling bee competition, or win this speech competition, or got a B instead of an A on a test, I got my ass chewed

Over shit the average parent would be ecstatic about.

So I started not caring about what other people wanted from me. Because nobody cared about what I really wanted to do.

And that’s a fine line to tow because you want to push your children to succeed but you also wanna know what makes them tick so when they stumble you can help

Through my failures I had to figure out a lot of shit on my own & that was some bullshit cuz I’m like “how the hell yall gon ask me to do some shit but if I don’t understand it, you can’t help cuz you don’t understand it either ”

Little did he know it was perfect PhD prep

Anyway I told him this and he was like “you know I can see where you’re coming from with that.”

Then he said something else that shocked me too

“Because of how I grew up I never wanted you guys (me and my sister) to feel like we didn’t care.”

Then he opened up.

He talked about his relationship with his dad, my pawpaw, and talked about all the things he had to go through as a kid.

Extreme poverty, physical abuse, verbal abuse from his dad, things id never seen from him.

And like I told him I knew about some of those things.

We have family Christmas parties every year and I normally don’t say much while I’m there. I watch and listen to stories from our elders and they had it rough.

So I knew that his upbringing was rough too. But he never came out and said it and my pawpaw never showed it.

“I wanted you to have your own relationship with your granddad outside of the relationship that o had with him. I never wanted my experience with him to affect yours in anyway.”

I’m really glad that he did that but it also made me understand my dad a lot more.

Growing up I always thought my dad was overly emotional and about certain things and would get angry very easily

Yesterday I finally understood why. He was scared of his children having to endure the same things that he did.

Our parents are still learning just like we are.

“I get that you didn’t want us to go through the same things that you did, but in some ways we did because it was just a different extreme from what happened to you.”

“Yeah I can see that too. And for a while I didn’t care if you liked me, I cared that you were successful.”

Finally we gettin some real honesty around this bitch

Anyway the convo goes on for another couple hours.

“Well son im glad that our relationship has gotten here at 34 because now we can spend the next two quarters of my life enjoying it.”

Best birthday present ever.